Category Archives: SEO

Can you stop someone linking to your website?

Computer Aid Posted on by

I recently had a very concerned lady call me about her website, and how she thought someone was “interfering” with her site by adding links to her site from other “bad” and “spammy” sites.

Well, the answer is: you cannot control who links to you, nor how they link to you.

This might sound like a horrible situation, but its just the way it is.

A real-world comparison is: can you stop someone from sending you letters via the post?

Of course the answer is: No

If someone wants to wast their money sending you hundreds of letters per day, then there is little you can do… Particularly if they send the letters from different mailboxes…

But its not as bad as it might seem.

Google (and other search engines), keep track of the “neighbourhood” that your site belongs to. This means: if you have a music web site, and most links from your site point at other music sites, and other music sites have links pointing to your site… then google will put your site into its internal “music” category.

So, if your site gets some links from, say, a computer website, or a “spam” website, then google will automatically “tone down” the importance of those unrelated links.

What you should never, never do, is link back to the unrelated websites, out of “revenge”. This will tell google that you want to take part in the category of the unrelated website (by effectively “voting” for it)… this will make the “bad” links more important, and seriously downgrade your site “in googles eyes”.

So, the best way to minimise the effect of bad links to your website is to make sure you have good links to your website.

Computer Aid: The Movie

Computer Aid Posted on by

A few weeks ago, I read a great article on how to make a company mission statement.

Take a look at seo review

Instead of the boring and meaningless one-liners that most companies use, this guy suggested something like a movie trailer.

So, following the cookie-cutter approach, I came up with a “movie trailer” for Computer Aid.

And it was real fun to make (even my wife had a laugh when I read it to her)

movie

Now read this like you’re a movie voice-over guy:

In a town where computers slow down and freeze, one computer repairer comes to the rescue. When Internet connections fizzle and stop and all hope is lost, Computer Aid springs into action, and gets you surfing again. Computer Aid will impress you with their professionalism, experience, competence and efficiency. When things just don’t compute, someone can fix your computer and show you how to tame the internet.

You’ll laugh, when you see how easily they fix your problems. You’ll cry, when you realise you didn’t need to spend days trying to fix computer problems yourself.

Computer Aid: We can help you.

 

I was tempted to make the last line: Computer Aid: Coming soon to a theater near you!

🙂

exitjunction: How to get penalised using adsense (and not know it!)

Computer Aid Posted on by

After a prior “experiment” with exitjuction, I found myself with half the traffic I normally have. This was because search engines don’t like exitjunction somehow.

About a week after I ended the experiment, I noticed something unusual:

Yahoo traffic bounced back to its normal levels immediately, but google traffic only improved slightly.

 

See the graphs:

ej-3

ej-4

Why? Maybe google is a bit slower to respond… but maybe not.

I remember adding 2 youtube video ads to my pages with adsense (one in the sidebar, and one at the bottom of individual posts).

Do I have too many Adsense ad units running at the same time?

I kinda remember that there might have been a limit, so I investigate.

Oops, looks like there is a limit of 3 ad units per page… and I had 4… but after some more searching, I find that there are different limits on different ad units:

  • Max of 3 “content” ad units per page
  • Max of 3 link ad units per page
  • Max of 1 youtube video units per page (oops again!).
  • Max of 2 adsense search boxes per page

Weird: you get hit if you have only 2 video units, but its ok if you have 3 + 3 + 1 + 2 = 9 units in the right proportion!

So around the 22 Feb, I removed the second youtube unit, and the results were:

ej-5

What a relief!

It took over a week for my google traffic to recover, but its now back to normal.

So there you go: you can get penalised by google without even realising it, but by correcting your adsense mistake, google will (eventually) trust you again.

For those of you who might wonder: my (tiny) adsense income also took a huge nosedive during the penalty period.

Exitjunction, Yahoo, Google, and Adsense

Computer Aid Posted on by

I recently heard of an interesting advertising company called exitjunction.

I liked the idea, as the advertising doesn’t take up space on my website.

The way it works is: someone finds your website via a search engine, they take a stickybeak, then decide to press the browser back button to look for something else. Instead of going back to the search engine, they get taken to an exitjunction.com advert page (that looks like search results).

At this point, you can either click on an ad, or you can click the back button once again, and end up back at the search engine.exitjunction1

Now, I did a bit of research, and I found some people saying it could interfere with google adsense. But nobody had any positive proof… it was all: “maybe”, “it shouldn’t”, “it might”.

OK, I’ll try it out.

I also decided to try out the new google youtube ads at the same time (I should know better by now: never do multiple changes, as you don’t know which one is causing the problem).

My adsense income is so low, that I figured that it won’t matter if I get penalised for a while.

At first, everything seemed fine, but after 6 days (15th Feb), I noticed a huge drop in traffic (from around 1,000 unique visits per day to about 500). See the graph:ej-1

I took a look at my website stats, and I could see that the traffic from google, yahoo and MSN search results, had dropped almost immediately after implementing exitjunction, but this drop was masked by an increase in direct and referred traffic (until all traffic dropped after 6 days). See graph:

ej-2

So, I decided to take out exitjunction, and the search engine traffic started improving, but only slightly.

Luckily, the overall traffic didn’t drop to almost zero… thanks in large part to entrecard traffic… Thank you EntreCard!

Maybe it will take a few weeks for traffic to return to normal… I hope!

The income from people clicking on exitjunction ads was lower than what I get from adsense, so removing exitjunction was an easy decision.

I can only hope that at some point in the future, google and exitjunction will play together nicely. But for now, I’m putting exitjunction on the back burner.

Why does exitjunction affect search traffic?

entrecard, CTR, and pages per visit

Computer Aid Posted on by

Some people get too caught up in their website statistics, and end up doing things that are actually worse for their website popularity.

I find people who want to “make money” from their website/blog will often give up on sites like entrecard, stumbleupon, etc.

The reasons they give seem reasonable:

  • They get an increase in visitors, but also a huge decrease in the number of pages per visit.
  • Visitors increase, but the adsense CTR (Click through rate for adverts) decreases.

The implication is that extra traffic doesn’t generate any extra income, thus the extra traffic is bad traffic.

Recently, I also noticed the entrecard and stumble effect directly:

  • approx 20% increase in visitors (over many weeks) from entrecard.
  • a sudden spike (tripling) of visitors from stumbleupon (over just 1 day)

And sure enough: the extra visits did not result in any extra clicks on my ads.

Yet I still think Entrecard and stumbleupon are worthwhile.

I look upon these services in a similar way as traditional classified newspaper advertising… or even yellow pages directory advertising.

My experience with classified ads has been that despite paying for a weekly advert, I get between 0 and 5 calls per week from the classified. Often it can be a few weeks of nothing: no calls via the classifieds.

When the newspaper has a circulation of 80 000 , then the clickthrough callthrough rate is incredibly low. Why would anyone bother. Yet many do. Why?

The answer is: it works in the long term.

You might find the vast majority of website visits from stumbleupon/entrecard are just 5 second visits. But you do get the occasional visitor that actually likes your site, and who becomes a regular visitor (who would not have done so otherwise).

For Computer Aid, I’m also aware that I am also building better brand recognition (without spending anything).

I think I’m doing well, when I think that many companies spend obscene amounts of money to build better brand recognition for their companies.

So… I’d say don’t worry much about stats like CTR, as long as your ad clicks/sales remain the same, then the extra eyeballs on you site will have good long-term effects.

computer aid website trends

Computer Aid Posted on by

Looking at my website stats, I’ve noticed an unusual trend:

The daily number of visitors seems fairly constant on weekdays (about 300 to 350 unique visitors per day)… but on weekends, it dips slightly, to somewhere between 260 and 310 unique visitors per day.

My intuition says it should be the other way around: people will most likely have computer problems (and search for solutions) over weekends.

I guess it just goes to show that intuition and experience, sometimes, have nothing to do with reality.

designing websites

Computer Aid Posted on by

I’ve recently had lots of adventures creating some websites.

Being too busy to do these websites myself, I decided to ask/subcontract a friend to handle the website design.

Well, there were many problems along the way, with a fixed website quote, customers constantly changing their mind, customers wanting something that they liked personally (but not necessarily appealing to their website viewers), long hours, problems with image quality, personality clashes, etc etc.

Along the way, I’ve learned many valuable lessons:

  • Asking a friend to work with you can put a large strain on the friendship.
  • Website design contracts must be in writing (not verbal), clearly defining what will be done, and more importantly, what will not be done.
  • Designing a good website will take a lot longer than you expect, don’t be afraid to accurately quote for the real costs involved (or quote an hourly rate).
  • Maintain a high level of communication with customers (I failed on this one… it was impossible to do, while juggling other work)
  • Avoid flash websites. Whoever holds the source code, has the customer over a barrel (and Google doesn’t like flash).

The end results are fantastic, but its not an experience I’d like to repeat.

For those who are interested, take a look at:

nuzu.com.au

janpowersfarmersmarkets.com.au

Growth in Computer Aid web traffic (and visitors) via SEO

Computer Aid Posted on by

I’m totally amazed at the growth in traffic to the Computer Aid website.

Admittedly, I have spent a lot of time studying SEO techniques, and applying them to the website, and I can see that all my efforts are starting to pay off.

As they say, a picture is worth 1024 words, so here are the results to date:

Computer Aid traffic growth

To be honest, I just look at the figures for unique visitors (the orange bars), as its the most indicative of the true popularity.

A figure like “hits” and “page views” can be easily manipulated… I could double the the hits on Computer aid by just placing an extra 15 small pictures on most of my web pages, but it doesn’t change how many people actually look at my website.

Looking over the last 16 months of growth, I can see that there was no single factor that contributed to the 22-fold increase in unique visitors to the website.

There were a few minor hiccups along the way: the most notable of which was an unintentional “duplicate content” problem in the early days, which caused google to drop my ranking for the words “brisbane computer repairs” from 50th to 350th.

Anyone contemplating doing their own SEO to improve their own website ranking should probably consider the following tips:

  • Start a blog.
  • Update your blog REGULARLY
  • Update your blog at LEAST twice per week.
  • Make sure the vast majority of your blog posts, discuss topics directly relevant to whatever your website is about (eg a website about nuts and bolts should have a blog that only talks about nuts and bolts (eg sizes, shapes, metals, techniques, etc))
  • Pick your wording and titles VERY carefully. A very good grasp of the (English) language is essential. You must consider what a typical “web surfer” would type into a google search, and then use those words in your title and body. This is not as easy as it sounds, yet its very important.
  • Don’t post something that has already been talked about by thousands of others (eg the world trade center bombing in NY)
  • The flipside of the last point is: Do post something you know, which few other people would know. It makes you appear (to google) as an expert in your field. Don’t be afraid of telling your trade “secrets”… chances are: only others in the same field will read your posts, and they probably already know the “secrets” anyway. The internet is a community that punishes those that keep secrets, and rewards those who share.
  • You must think like a marketing executive. Read books about sales and marketing, then apply that knowledge to how you word your overall website. The wording is vital. You must think long and hard about what words and phrases you put on your website (this is not so important for blog posts). You must know what your customers want, and then appeal to them with what you write. Don’t take guesses, you must find out what they want (and sometimes asking the customers won’t give you the answers!)
  • Monitor your own website statistics. If your hosting company cannot give you the statistics you need, then consider something like google analytics.
  • Optimise your web pages. To see how google views your website, strip out all the images, videos, flash, and html tags. If what you have left looks meaningless, then google will rank you accordingly. Put some quality information in there.
  • Check your website navigation. Don’t implement a huge structure of spaghetti links. Ideally, aim for 5 – 10 links per page, and you should be able to get from any page on your site, to any other page, with just 2 mouse clicks.
  • Optimise your .htaccess file (learn about 301 redirect), and make sure xyz.com and www.xyz.com both redirect to www.xyz.com. I’ve seen some sites, where xyz.com returns a 404 error!
  • Read all you can about SEO (or if you don’t have time, then hire an SEO expert)

For some businesses, correct SE Optimisation can lead to giant leaps in profits.

And remember: some SEO experts are better than others. But to get good optimisation, be prepared to pay more than the original cost of developing the website… any cheaper, and your website probably won’t reach its full potential (or at worst, will drop in popularity).

Secretive hosting / website design companies

Computer Aid Posted on by

Recently, I’ve had a few business customers ask about improving their websites, but not willing to go back to their original hosting / website design companies (for various reasons).

It seems to be common practice to make it difficult for customers to find a better hosting / website design solution.

One practice is to “hold on” to domain information, which a customer can use for pointing their domain name to another hosting company.

Most customer are not aware that domain data, hosting solutions, and actual website content are 3 totally independent aspects of a website.

Nowadays, domain names and hosting solutions are so cheap, that I recommend most customers handle their own domain registration and hosting (or at least keep the details, so that they can ask someone to change them on their behalf.

This gives the customer complete control over how they want their website to look… If they decide that a website design company are not listening to them, then they just get someone else.

But when a website design company decides to handle the domain registration and hosting for a customer, then many start charging highly inflated prices for the hosting and domain registration. Sometimes its just a historical price calculation that hasn’t been adjusted for todays financial realities… other times, its knowing that the customer doesn’t understand what he is paying for, and doesn’t even know what to ask, in order go gain some control over their own website.

So, I ask on behalf of my customers, and I usually get long delays, and various excuses, before I get any meaningful replies (And I can understand why: who wants to give away a very good source of profits).

The mobile phone industry was in a similar state: phone numbers could not be transferred, so many businesses wound up being “locked” to a phone company.

It took legislation to fix that problem… at least with domain names (and hosting), the true owner can usually regain control over the domain, irrespective of a third company being uncooperative.

Anyway, getting cpanel and ftp access is usually not too hard, but domain access seems to be the most difficult, but fortunately it can be forced to be repointed to a new hosting solution (by the authorised owner).